The plan to develop an e-government was proposed by the Ministry of Information and Communications.
Developing e-government in Vietnam
It aims to increase the efficiency of government agencies while reducing operation costs and making government actions more transparent, according to the proposal signed Friday last week by Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung.

The plan aims to see residents able to download the necessary documents for administrative procedures and be updated on how far any applications have progressed at government agencies.

According to the plan, sixty percent of all documents exchanged between government agencies will be in electric form and possibly all the meetings between the Prime Minister and ministers, government agencies and city/provincial governments will be conducted online.

All government agencies at a district level will be required to have websites, half of all tax announcements and 30 percent of applications for construction permits will be submitted online and 90 percent of city/provincial customs departments will carry out administrative procedures online, according to the plan.

Applying for a business license, gaining construction and investment permits, driving licenses, permits for healthcare jobs and for establishing representative offices in Vietnam will be among the public services prioritized to be conducted online, it said.

The government has also planned to grant electronic passports to all Vietnamese residents.

In order to achieve its goals, the government will make use of existing infrastructure facilities belonging to telecoms businesses, develop an online archive center for all government information, build centers to correlate information between the central and local governments, and develop a database for various fields such as customs, health care, banking, insurance, construction, accounting, education, economy and environment, society and culture.

The proposal also lists services that are prioritized to go online for each ministry, the Government Inspectorate, State Bank of Vietnam and the Committee of Ethnic Minorities Affairs.

More regulations will be introduced to guarantee information security and to facilitate the plan, which is expected to cost VND1.7 trillion (US$87.2 million) of the state budget.